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Topic: Carnolian or new world carnolian (Read 13648 times)

Anyone out ther have any experience with this strain? I have only had various types of italians,or feral italians, so far and am curious about different varieties. Also a list of suppliers who would mail these is greatly appreciated.

I've never had any of the carnolians. Many people swear by them, but I've also read they are a bit swarmy. They make many claims about their wintering abilitys and making do with short stores. I would like to try them myself one of these days, but it's going to have to wait another season I think. Maybe Robo or some of the people on the board from the north east can give us some good info on them.

Anyone out ther have any experience with this strain? I have only had various types of italians,or feral italians, so far and am curious about different varieties. Also a list of suppliers who would mail these is greatly appreciated.

I had 10 years carniolans. 3 year of them they swarmed so much that 1/3 of my bees dissapered to the forest. And off course the best hives. At the same time my friend reported that he had no swarms with Italians.

One day I had from 13 hives 7 swarms at tree tops.

When I started with first two carniolans, those brought each 80 lbs dandelion honey at early summer, and Italians were empty. I draw a conclusion that Carniolans must have older field bees and they have had more pollen in hives over winter. And that was correct.

When I started to feed with pollen bees at spring , there was no difference at development and yield gathering within Italian and Carniolan.

It is true that surely black bee can fly better in cold wether. But it does not compensate swarming.

I have Finnish origin Italians. They winter very fine. No difference with Carniolans. If queens are from New Seland or from South, they often have better instinct for winter.

In Finnish forum I have asked how professionals manage with Carniolan swarming? No one answered.

Your swarming season is about 3 moth long. We have 1 month. Heavy work to watch what are they going to do.

It is better to keep 2 lazy hives than run after 1 good one which does every trick it invent.

New world Carniolan is a hybride. Perhaps nothing to do with Carciolan race.

But thanks to Carniolans. I learned to feed bees with pollen at spring and now I give lessons in Finland, how to give soya flour and yeast with pollen. And of couse warming with electrict. 3 times faster spring development than ith natural way. In Canada pring feeding is normally recommended.

I am just learning and writing lesson " nutrition of bees and need of amino acids".

Also in some parts of country you need insulated brood boxes. With them you get better spring development. Then you get good advantage from early yield like from fruit trees, berry bushes and mapples etc.

Why don't you try with some stryrofoam brood box and you will see how colony developes.

You can do your own boxes from styrofoam construction board. In our country the cost is 4$ per box. There are many qualities but choose the hard and tough one. We have just courses how to buid own boxes from boards.

Here is some interesting information about the New World Carniolan, if we are ever going to be chemical free, we have to have a better Honeybee. I think NWC shows a lot of promise.Susan Cobey and the New World CarniolanÂ® Breeding Progam By

Thereâ€™s something about Apis mellifera carnica, the Carniolan honey bee. This child of the Balkans, originally from Slovenia, the future site of the 2003 Apimondia Congress, holds a special place in the hearts of many beekeepers. Although a minor component of U.S. bee stock, it is the majority in other parts of the world from Egypt to Chile. It has a panopoly of characteristics that are increasingly important to beekeepers, including gentleness, less-than-average propolis collection, and little inclination to rob, the real bugaboo of its cousin, Apis mellifera ligustica, the Italian honey bee. It is known as the â€œspringâ€ bee for it builds population rapidly early in the active season. More importantly it closes down its brood rearing quickly when environmental conditions deteriorate, resulting in less food consumption and a potentially increased winter survival. It is considered in many parts of the world as the best bee stock in which to find resistance or tolerance to the Varroa mite. Some of the first evidence of Varroa tolerance, in fact, came from a population of Carniolan bees in Yugoslavia described by Dr. Jovan Kulincevic, an associate of the late Dr. Walter Rothenbuhler of The Ohio State University. This bee was subsequently introduced into the U.S. and is known as the â€œYugoâ€ bee.

Carniolan behavior, therefore, is equivalent to the â€œholy grailâ€ in some beekeeping circles, and the raison dâ€™etre of the New World CarniolanÂ® Breeding Program, run by Susan W. Cobey at The Ohio State University. Sue is easily spotted in a crowd, as I recently noticed at the airport in Santiago, Chile. She is tall. This and her long blond locks stand out in Latin America, but it is her expertise and enthusiasm for bee breeding that beekeepers of that region and around the world really take notice of, and with good reason. Not only does she run one of the premier honey bee breeding programs in the U.S., but she is also the only person to my knowledge who is training others in this important arena.

Sue and I sat down in her office on the Ohio State University campus and her home in the environs of Hilliard, OH to discuss her career and aspirations. It is immediately apparent that, although greatly influenced by those at institutions of higher learning, she is not an â€œacademic.â€ Sue is one of those rare people who easily spans the gap between the ivory tower of higher education and down-to-earth beekeeping. Her entomological career began early, when tent caterpillars she collected escaped to terrorize kindergarten class. She switched majors at the University of Delaware and graduated with a B.S. in entomology, her only academic degree. A student exchange program provided her first honey bee experience with Dr. Michael Burgett at Oregon State University, where she was able to first work outside and actually rear insects, instead of focusing on killing them with pesticides.

Her training really began by doing grunt beekeeping work at Wenner Apiaries, where she learned practical beekeeping management from Clarence Wenner himself, who she says was â€œa true naturalist.â€ Sueâ€™s mentors in bee breeding include Dr. John Harbo, who taught her instrumental insemination, and Drs. Robert Page and Harry H. Laidlaw, who inculcated her with the philosophy of the closed population honey bee-breeding protocol that bears their name.1 She also had ample opportunity to participate in practical breeding programs as a technician at the now defunct Genetic Systems, Inc. in Labelle, FL, as well as those of the University of California at Davis and the USDA Bee Breeding and Stock Center at Baton Rouge, LA.

Enter her husband, Tim Lawrence. His influence was important to her career in that he helped â€œpushâ€ Sue out of her shell of â€œshyness.â€ He continues to support her as she travels the world teaching queen production and instrumental insemination. Together they developed the â€œidealistic dreamâ€ of their own beekeeping and fruit producing business in Californiaâ€™s Vaca Valley. However, they were victimized by unpredictable change that so often afflicts agriculture. Closure of the Canadian border in the 1980s because of discovery in the U.S. of both tracheal and Varroa mites meant loss of many key customers. At the same time, the Kiwi fruit market collapsed. By then, Sue had developed her passion for instrumental insemination, the basis for true bee breeding, and began to do and teach this on a limited basis, identifying a â€œniche marketâ€ for this activity. She assisted Dr. Orley (Chip) Taylor at the University of Kansas in his efforts to understand honey bee mating behavior, and was invited several times to Mexico, as that country attempted to confront the challenges of the introduced Africanized honey bee.

Uprooting themselves out of one of Californiaâ€™s finest valleys and moving to the U.S. heartland was difficult for both Tim and Sue. But a steady income and the opportunity to continue her breeding program at the Ohio State University as apiary technician was not easy to pass up. So in 1990, Sue became the Staff Apiarist at the Walter C. Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Research Laboratory, where she coordinates research projects and also is able to continue her passion by producing New World Carniolan (NWCÂ®) queens, as well as conducting classes in queen rearing and instrumental insemination. It seems somehow fitting that one of the best honey bee breeding programs in the U.S. is now administered from a building that bears the name of perhaps the greatest of apicultureâ€™s genetic pioneers.

Indeed, as we discussed the status of breeding programs around the world, I thought Walter would have been proud that many of the necessary links he described in his seminal paper on the topic have been put in place in the facility that bears his name.2 In addition, he would also be happy that the University he worked at for over two decades now supports an innovative bee breeding program that is available nowhere else. And that it could be a model for a â€œnew waveâ€ of queen production, via true breeding, that might help the beekeeping industry recover Phoenix-like from the ashes of a potentially disastrous session on the pesticide treadmill.

Sue and I agree that the vast majority of queen producers do little breeding. This is not a criticism; producers must concentrate on production as their livelihood depends on sales out the front door. The driving force in the market is price. Beekeepers have been lulled into a false sense of security that good queens should be available relatively inexpensively. Although economical queens were readily available when there was a relatively large genetic base, which also included feral honey bees, and no exotic mites, that is no longer the case. The appearance of antibiotic tolerance (TerramycinÂ®-resistant American foulbrood) and resistance by Varroa to fluvalinate and coumaphos, along with appearance of a totally new organism, the small hive beetle (Aethina tumida), has turned U.S. apiculture on its ear. The long-range solution to these problems must come from bee genetics (breeding) and the resulting queens will not be cheap.

The results of Sueâ€™s New World CarniolanÂ® Progam are positive and encouraging. She has been able to develop bees that require no fumigillin for nosema control, no tracheal mite treatment with minimal chemical application for Varroa, and no antibiotic treatment for foulbrood. Sue and I agree that Varroa is the biggest problem facing beekeepers today. The most important task for any beekeeper in the present environment is to control this mite first. All other concerns must take a back seat.

The basis for any breeding program is stock selection. Thus, Sue and Tim, originally collected bees from across the U.S. and Canada to establish their base population in the Vaca Valley of California. This initial genetic collection was moved to Ohio, a very different environment with harsh winters. The stock has now become adapted to those specific conditions over time, and Sue continues to search out genetic material to be incorporated into the program.

It is important to realize that Sueâ€™s program is based on traditional Carniolan behavior, not the vaunted Carniolan honey bee itself. This at first seems confusing, given the name. No morphometric, allozyme, cuticular hydrocarbon, nor DNA analysis is performed to verify the bee she uses is indeed Apis mellifera carnica. Nevertheless, Sue continues to select for darker bees in general, an indication of the Carniolan race, to ensure that the stock has a different look than that regarded generally as Italian (yellow). The primary focus of selection is general performance, not specific individual traits, like hygienic behavior or SMR (suppressed mite reproduction), although these have been added to the criteria in the selection process. As she says, when describing her stock â€œthereâ€™s no Russian, no Yugo and no SMR.â€

Again, it is the behavior that Carniolan honey bees are known for that is of utmost importance in the New World CarniolanÂ® Breeding Program. These include productivity, gentleness, and specifically for Ohio, winter hardiness. Since traits for â€œmite resistanceâ€ or â€œtoleranceâ€ are common, but often rarely expressed or shown, they can be selected for in almost any stock, and so this has also been incorporated into the program. Sue feels it is important for the industry to have choices via a variety of specialty stocks, of which hers is but one. A description of several, including New World CarniolanÂ®, is found in an article by Dr. Stu Jacobson in the November 2002 issue of Bee Culture.

Sueâ€™s secrets are simple. The keys are assiduously keeping records and controlling gene flow through instrumental insemination and a closed breeding population. The selected traits that are part of the New World CarniolanÂ® Bee Breeding Progam are the following:

Industry: Honey producers and pollinators. Those found susceptible to disease or mites are eliminated, as are those that dwindle in winter, which is a final selecting criterion.

Rapid Spring Buildup: The signal trait of the Carniolan honey bee.

Gentleness: Calm, gentle and a pleasure to work with no matter the size of the population.

Overwintering: Efficient use of winter stores and winter clusters having a high tolerance for severe cold. Those that dwindle and do not survive winter are automatically eliminated.

Pollen Collection: Efficient pollinators that work in cool and drizzly weather.

Brood Viability: Solid brood patterns to maintain the integrity of the breeding population.

Hygienic Behavior: High uncapping and removing of brood killed by freezing.

Sue looks at the above criteria at a rather gross level. These estimates or evaluations are something any beekeeper can do. She has and continues to give her talk on the specific details of her system at many different venues across the world. These are also available on the World Wide Web.3 Importantly, they are done continuously so that each year a new generation of New World CarniolanÂ® queens is instrumentally inseminated and then evaluated in the field. The top performing colonies are selected as breeders to establish the next generation in accordance with the Page-Laidlaw Closed Population Breeding Program.4

The bottom line, according to Sue, is annually producing a test population of 200 instrumentally inseminated queens. The better performers are then used as breeders and provided to cooperating New World CarniolanÂ® producers, who sell open-mated daughters to the beekeeping public. This brings in about $25,000 gross income each year, which the University allows Sue to spend in further developing the program. Clearly, it is heavily supported by the University, which in the final analysis is providing a subsidy to the beekeeping industry.

Sue knows that there is no way her program can supply the necessary quantity of stock to an industry hungry for a selected honey bee that will enable it to gracefully exit an increasing chemical dependency. Thus, she sees her future in educating a cadre of individuals who will take on the task using the tools she and others have developed. Surprisingly, her message has been heard in other countries far more than in the U.S. Thus, she has worked mostly with producers in Mexico (Enrique Estrada, Ernesto Guzman), Chile (Alberto Poch), Argentina, Australia, South Africa, Egypt, Costa Rica, Jamaica and Canada.

The cornerstone of Sueâ€™s training program continues to be the courses she has developed in queen rearing, instrumental insemination and bee breeding offered each summer at The Ohio State University. These have been well attended by an able and willing corps of students, again mostly from outside the country, presumably aided by advertisement via the World Wide Web.4 In the future, she hopes to be able to deliver packaged courses on site that incorporate all of the pieces that now comprise her breeding program

In conclusion, Sue Cobeyâ€™s goal is to help beekeepers develop a more professional and responsible beekeeping. As she said at the latest Eastern Apicultural Society meeting at Cornell University (August 2002), step-by-step beekeepers are emerging from the â€œhypeâ€ and â€œhyperboleâ€ of crisis management, which has resulted in maintaining susceptible bees through chemical treatment. In the future, therefore, they will increasingly let the honey bee rely much more on its own devices through the results of conscious, committed breeding like those of the New World CarniolanÂ® Bee Breeding Progam.

5. The Ohio State University Honey Bee Breeding Program, accessed November 12, 2002

Â® M.T. Sanford, All Rights Reserved

Here is what Lloyd Spear from Ross Rounds has to say:

Feb-3-2005 9:37 AM I have exclusively used Carniolan's for more than 20 years. Here in Albany, NY, they swarm much less than Italians. The first step in controling their impulse to swarm is to be certain you are buying from someone who is part of the New World Carniolan program. This stock, controlled by Sue Cobey at Ohio State, has been developed to have a low swarming impulse. Producers using this stock are located in California and Hawaii. See the magazines or contact me for specific names. Yes, an important second step would be to annually requeen. But many, including myself, are hesitant to kill a queen who is doing a good job. If so, just taking the 'first step' will help a lot.

Here is his contact info:

2005 Packages and Nucs

by Lloyd Spear

Introduction

2005 Nucs and Packages

We will again offer 3-lb. packages and nucs in 2005. Packages from Wilbanks. Available near Albany, NY afternoon of April 17 or anytime April 18. $59 each.

Four-frame nucs with marked Carniolan queens. Two frames of brood guaranteed, and we usually deliver three. All brood and eggs in nuc will be from the included queen. These are truly mini-hives and should produce a full crop in 2005. Tenative pickup date is May 14. $79 each.

"The results of Sueâ€™s New World CarniolanÂ® Progam are positive and encouraging. She has been able to develop bees that require no fumigillin for nosema control, no tracheal mite treatment with minimal chemical application for Varroa, and no antibiotic treatment for foulbrood. Sue and I agree that Varroa is the biggest problem facing beekeepers today. The most important task for any beekeeper in the present environment is to control this mite first. All other concerns must take a back seat."

Did you notice the "minimal chemical application"? Sounds all well and good but right now there are people using no chemicals, none, zip, zero, nadda, but no one wants to listen.

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:rainbowflower: Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak. :rainbowflower:

Did you notice the "minimal chemical application"? Sounds all well and good but right now there are people using no chemicals, none, zip, zero, nadda, but no one wants to listen.

Watch over Jerry! You are surrounded with chemicals and you even don't notice that. Every day you are using them. Salt, sugar, gazoline, asetic in food, anti oxidise agent, stabilization.. Just look the label of food package, or label of clothes, plastic surfaces everywhere....

And woouldn't it be great to start somewhere in the reduction of chemical intake?

I have bee in job in environmental protection 14 years. We just kicked off waste incinerator from the middle the city. It was great job and hard work. We saved 200 milj $ when new one was not build.

If you think that you personally make the better world with your tiny acts, it is nonsence. Dont at least draw others with you little tricks. Just wasting your time and brains. You must find something bigger. You cannot save world with your every sentence. You are adult man. You can decide what you take in. But first look at the label :D

well im one that thinks that it will bee genetics or traits that saves the bee's not small cell foundation, small cell has some advantages I guest but i have heard people have bee's next to each other one on small cell and the other on regular cell and they both go for years with no medication. small cell to me has not proved enough for me to take the time or the money to go that route, if one day it does prove to be the best route then ill go small cell but as for now i'm not going to waste my time or money regressing bee's when i strongly believe it will be genetics or traits in a bee that saves the day, but if some one want to go to small cell i would be interested to hear there results , ALLWAYS KEEP A OPEN MIND, : confusion not confusous (just my 2 cents)

I have heard people on small cell tell me that using a TBH and blank starter strips over an amount of time from swarms and new starter strips bee's will regress naturally, so if bees will regress naturally and there were so many feral hives in the wild, if small cell is the answer, why did feral bee's get whiped out when the varroa mite spread across america, thats the only thing that has me against small cell being the answer. it has to be bee genetics or traits in the bee to bee mite resistant.

Logged

THAT's ME TO THE LEFT JUST 5 YEARS FROM NOW!!!!!!!!

Never be afraid to try something new. Amateurs built the ark, Professionals built the Titanic

I do agree that Small Cell may not be the silver bullet that everyone is looking for, but, in order to give my girls a fighting chance I will take the chemical free opportunity by using SCF in order to give the bees less mites to contend with. Smaller cells have been proven to create earlier emergence from egg to mature bee, even if it's only a few days earlier time, it will lessen the amount of time the mites have to reproduce.

With the reproduction interruption of the mites taken care of with the Small Cell, I can then concentrate on breeding for genetics. And all this in a biological manner, imagine that...

Not all feral hives were wiped out. I said this some where here that how do we know it was the mites that reduced ferals? Did any one go around finding all the dead outs and determine what wiped them out? Could have been a bad year for nector, queens dying at a bad time, cold/wet, fires, pesticides, etc etc.

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:rainbowflower: Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak. :rainbowflower:

all those calamitys in a successive string of years? Mites had a hand in it. The argument about there actually being feral bees out there continues. The old German Black bees have dissappeared from here. So have the grey mountain bees, but they were gettng pretty thin before the mite invasion. I haven't seen either for years. I'm sure the escaping swarms from managed colonies are gaining ground, but who knows the cycle of reinfestation with mites? May just be a couple years before they are knocked back down again. Or, with some luck, the bees will learn or evolve to manage the mites. The small cell arguement raises many questions, most obvious is the very one you asked TWT. Phoenix mentioned that he has had the same concerns regarding small cell and feral bees. With what we are hearing from California, we may be on the verge of another decimation of hives across the country. Only time will tell. But I'm pulling for all you guys trying the small cell, the oxalic, the fungus, and the selective breeding programs for more than just production and gentleness. We all need something good to happen.

. I said this some where here that how do we know it was the mites that reduced ferals? Did any one go around finding all the dead outs and determine what wiped them out? Could have been a bad year for nector, queens dying at a bad time, cold/wet, fires, pesticides, etc etc.

the reason people think varroa whiped out feral hives is because what has happened to hive's not treated for varroa mites. a commercial beekeeper told me not long ago if he didnt treat his hive for varroa he wouldn't have enough bee's to stay in bussiness. he said he is sure to have some hives survive but would lose 1000's of hives because a majority of his bee's probably don't have those resistant traits but he can't afford to take that chance,but thats the thinking behind the varroa mites being the cause of the loses.

Logged

THAT's ME TO THE LEFT JUST 5 YEARS FROM NOW!!!!!!!!

Never be afraid to try something new. Amateurs built the ark, Professionals built the Titanic

I guess I'm not following.The fox is outside the hen house. The chickens are laying.The fox is inside the hen house. All the chickens that didn't roost in the rafters are dead.From this we can assume...........poor feed quality? bad weather? old age?the fox was an innocent bystander?

The mites are in the hives. Some bees may have the genetics, the tenacity to fight them off. Most at this point don't. It takes a long time for a naturally selected trait to become present in an entire species. And while it's happening, the mites aren't standing still either.

For some reason, it reminds me of the gun lobby argument. Guns don't kill people, but people do. Mites don't kill bees, but the virii that infestation vectors into the population do. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but eventually.